Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (3 page)

3

B
runa called Yiannis as soon as she left the psych-guide. The old archivist’s face filled the entire screen of her mobile; he was glued to his computer, looking upset and worried.

“It’s a catastrophe, Bruna, a catastrophe. Gabi is really sick. She’s very damaged. Irreversibly harmed. I can’t handle her. She’s escaped. I’m sorry! It’s a tragedy. I’m a useless old man. I’m no good for anything. It would be better to die once and for all. It would be better to commit—”

Bruna cut him off. Preoccupied, she scratched her eyebrow, feeling the little scar caused by the explosion of the drone at the border. She hadn’t bothered to cover the wound; it had healed naturally, and now the scab was stinging. She pulled off a small piece with her nail and examined the tiny bit of skin. It looked like a small hard-shelled insect. She put the scab in her mouth and swallowed it. Human skin—as human as the skin of any human. In that sense the psych-guide was right. She sighed. It was a very hot afternoon. The sun, still high in the sky, seemed to be wrapped in gauze. The haze was caused by pollution, despite this being one of the Green zones, the cleanest and most privileged sectors on the planet. But it hadn’t rained for months. Even through the haze, the sun fatally fried the skin of humans. Hers, too, but the carcinogenic processes unleashed by the ferocious solar radiation usually took longer to cause damage than the ten years of her life. Anyway, reps enjoyed their own personal oncological cocktail. What did it matter if you added a bit more sun to the inevitable TTT death sentence?

Three years, ten months, and fourteen days
.

Bruna felt a drop of sweat slide down between her breasts. And that made her conscious of them underneath the lightweight blue material of her T-shirt. Hard. At least they wouldn’t droop. Reps died beautiful. Well, they reached TTT still beautiful. Perhaps that was part of the aversion humans had to them.

She dialed Yiannis’s number again.

“Hi, Bruna,” chirped a pleasant, smiling Yiannis. “Like I said, Gabi has escaped, but don’t worry: with her tracker chip she won’t go far. The only problem is that we’ll have to advise the police so they can locate her. But maybe you could take advantage of this to call Lizard. What do you think? It’s been a while since you saw each other, hasn’t it? It’s a perfect opportunity to reestablish contact.”

Husky controlled her grimace of irritation. They had inserted an endorphin pump next to the amygdala in Yiannis’s brain, the last word in the treatment of depression. Each time his emotional mood sank, the pump activated, and within a few minutes it flooded the amygdala with a soup of chemical well-being. The treatment managed to drag him out of his black pit, but the pump was badly adjusted, and Yiannis often entered a phase of expansive, cloying optimism that Bruna hated. So now he’d made her bad tempered thanks to his imprudent reference to Lizard. Not only that but she had a feeling that his depressive moods had become more intense since the archivist had been getting his endorphin hits. She hurried to hang up as soon as she’d promised to get in touch after she’d recovered Gabi.

The archivist was right, however. She’d have to advise the police so they could trace the little monster. That was the last thing the rep needed: proof for the authorities to think she was incapable of looking after the child. One more black mark on her questionable detective record. A nuisance just when she was about to recover her license, even if it would only be provisional and subject to her agreeing to therapy with the tactile.

All things considered, it might be convenient to call Lizard.

Paul Lizard, the wily reptile. The caiman
.

The inspector’s face appeared on her mobile. Fleshy, solid, square. Those perpetually sleepy eyelids that dimmed the green spark in his eyes.

“It’s been a long time, Bruna.”

“Yes, it has.” The rep had intended to sound lighthearted and casual, but now it seemed to her that she’d sounded recriminatory. She rushed to continue. “I wanted to ask you a favor. You see, they’ve temporarily canceled my license. A minor matter, nothing important. But a week ago, at the border of one of the Zero zones, I provisionally assumed responsibility for a ten-year-old Russian girl.”

Bruna was becoming more and more nervous. She’d rung Lizard without thinking—an absurd, irresponsible impulse spurred on by Yiannis’s absurd and irresponsible happiness—and now she realized that she had to explain too many things to him that she didn’t want to explain. The policeman was looking at her in that easygoing way he had, with that stonelike expression the rep knew only too well.

“Don’t tell anyone about the business of the girl, or rather, that’s what the favor’s about. What I mean is, it’s not necessary to go into the details. All you need to know is that the girl has escaped. She’s got a tracker chip, and I need you to trace her without letting on that you’re doing it, because just today they’ve given me back my license for a probationary three-month period and—”

“You don’t want to keep accumulating black marks.”

“Precisely.”

Lizard’s lips. Those lips that Bruna knew better than her own. A deceitful mouth. But delicious. The rep became aware of her breasts again, a tautness in her nipples, the insatiable hunger of her skin that came from a much deeper hunger. Sometimes Bruna hated her own sexuality, her animal need.

“So? Are you going to help me or not?”

“Of course. Calm down.”

“I’m extremely calm.”

“Sure,” Lizard replied sarcastically. “Give me the number of the chip.”

“LRR-52.”

Bruna examined Lizard’s profile as he manipulated something offscreen—probably a central computer.

“She’s in a lung-park. I’ve just sent you an active link. You’ll be able to track it for an hour. Will you be able to sort it out in that time?”

“Yes, of course. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. But I’m curious: They’ve given you the provisional license in return for what?”

The words bunched up in Bruna’s mouth. It was as if they’d suddenly become square, hard to roll out and say. “I have to . . . I have to go to a tactile for a few days.”

“Ah! A
tactile
,” Lizard said, smiling.

Bruna could sense Lizard thinking,
In other words you need to be touched.
She blushed, deeply mortified. It was embarrassing, indecent, shameful to need to be touched in the way that tactiles did.

With affection.

4

B
runa had assumed the lung-park in question was the Philippines Park, the one closest to home. But the tracker placed Gabi in the Retiro, the new artificial zone that Texaco-Repsol had constructed along one side of that emblematic, centuries-old park. So the rep had to hop onto a couple of travelators and sprint the last stretch of the route to get to her destination before the tracing link became inactive. Quick as a flash she crossed the traditional gardens, dusty and withering in the drought. As soon as she entered the lung-park, she felt the freshness and the clean, healthy air: artificial trees were much more efficient at exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen than natural ones. She stopped running so as not to scare the child and tracked her with her mobile. There were posters everywhere calling for silence: “This is an ecological, pure space. Please respect the peaceful environment.” Lung-parks were the only urban spaces where there was a ban on the installation of public screens, which blasted the airspace everywhere else with stupid images uploaded by citizens. They also had explosive-detecting archways at all the entrances to prevent the Instant Terrorists, known as Ins—that group of suicide activists with their crazy, antisystem ideology—from blowing themselves up. The lung-parks were in fact turning into a type of secular sanctuary: sacred, biologically sustainable zones. By the great Morlay, the nerve of Texaco-Repsol: having overexploited the planet, the company now pretended to be the high priest of ecology. The feathers of the artificial trees hung down from the tops of their poles, huge banners ten meters long and one meter wide made from an extremely fine and almost transparent red metallic thread. They swayed gently in the afternoon heat like the vibrating haze of a mirage, and made small chirruping sounds like crickets. As the sun was already low in the sky, the heat was bearable, so the lung-park was starting to fill with visitors walking among the dangling feathers of the trees. Bruna followed her tracker. Turning down one of the avenues, she saw the girl right away. She swallowed, dumbfounded: Gabi was sitting on the ground, begging. The monster was begging! She planted herself in front of the girl.

“A curse on all species! What the heck are you doing?” Bruna roared.

Gabi looked at her with disdain. In front of her was a gold-filigreed glass—one of Yiannis’s ancient glasses—and in the bottom two or three gaias and a few cents.

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m begging for money, and I’m not doing too badly.”

“You’re not allowed to beg! You can’t! They’ll arrest you!”

“How come? The city is full of beggars. There’s one right there. He’s shown me how to do it.”

Bruna looked where the girl was pointing. Near Gabi someone had left a plastic box containing some loose change and an old kid’s cell phone, one of those mobiles they had in day-care centers for first-time users, pink with little purple flowers. The scratched screen had a message in luminous words: “Back shortly.”

“I think he’s gone to the toilet. The guy’s legal,” said Gabi.

A wave of indignation rose up through Bruna, and she felt like slapping Gabi. “You can’t beg, dammit! You’re a minor! Children can’t beg! You’re going to get me into real trouble!”

She grabbed the monster by the arm and pulled her up from the ground. The girl shrieked. In that instant Bruna became conscious of where she was: they were surrounded by a dozen humans, all looking at her accusingly. A combat rep dragging a shouting child, disrupting the fabulous silence in the fabulous park belonging to the fabulous Texaco-Repsol, all so pure and peaceful. She let go of Gabi’s arm.

“We’re going home right now,” Bruna whispered.

The girl grudgingly picked up the glass, tipped the coins into her hand, and, grabbing the old backpack she’d retrieved from the rep the very first day and from which she was never separated, very carefully zipped open one section. With excessive secrecy she pulled the top part of a change purse through the tiny opening. Her caution suggested that the money-storing operation was going to be interminable, and Bruna was already exasperated, so she grabbed the backpack and took it from the girl.

“Let’s get this over with,” she growled as she removed the entire change purse and dropped the gaias inside it.

Then she noticed that the purse was attached to a piece of string. It was a high-quality piece of cord, natural, not synthetic—a very old cord. She must have stolen it from Yiannis, too.

“What’s this then?”

The string was tied to the clasp of the change purse with a small, perfect, very tight knot and then disappeared inside the backpack. The rep pulled on the twine, and a piece of candy emerged, also knotted, and then hanging from the same piece of string, a comb, and then . . .

Bruna couldn’t go on extracting the string, because Gabi snatched the backpack from her and started to run. Bruna ran after her and, even though the girl was very fast for her size, caught up with her in three strides.

“Where do you think you’re going?” asked the rep as she encircled Gabi’s body with both arms from behind.

Bruna tightened her grip because she expected the little Russian to struggle. But no sooner had she caught her than the little creature seemed to turn to stone. Rigid and still, inhumanly still. Gabi moved only her head; she bent her neck and, placing her mouth on Bruna’s forearm, bit viciously. The techno felt the girl’s teeth sink into her flesh. The well-rehearsed self-control of a combat rep prevented Bruna from jerking back, which would no doubt have torn open the wound considerably more.

That’s how the two of them remained—immobile and silent, united in an apparent embrace, with Bruna grasping the girl’s back and leaning over her as if she were protecting her from some danger, and Gabi’s curly, dirty hair tickling the techno’s cheek. The little Russian was clenching her jaw; the flesh was hurting. A drop of blood rolled down Bruna’s arm and fell to the ground. Bruna saw and smelled the blood. She also smelled Gabi’s adrenaline, the powerful smell of a frightened animal. Then she smelled something else. Something acidic, sharp. She looked down. The girl had wet herself.

So now what? Now what?
The irregular chirrup of the huge feathers on the trees sounded like the cry of a very small child.

“Gabi,” whispered Bruna, her throat tight and dry. “Gabi, you have to open your mouth. I promise I’m not going to do anything to you. I’m not going to touch you. I’m not going to take revenge. Open your mouth, let go of me, and we’ll go back to Yiannis.”

The girl gave no sign of having heard. A few seconds passed, and two more drops of blood fell—in fact, a small trickle.

“I won’t grab your backpack. I won’t take it away from you. I won’t look at it. Open your mouth. Open it, I said. Listen, my offer ends in one minute. If you don’t let go of me right now, I’ll have to do something. Even you must realize that we can’t go on like this forever.”

The little Russian sighed and relaxed her jaw. She spat out her prey with the same disdain of a dog spitting out a piece of inedible wood. Bruna moved her arm slowly and painfully. A perfect bite, two arches of blood. Good teeth. Bruna removed a dressing from the emergency kit she always carried in her backpack and covered the wound.

“Let’s go home,” said Bruna, grabbing the little Russian by the hand.

A small circle of onlookers had formed around them at the cautious distance that combat reps usually generated. When Bruna looked up, they all looked away and pretended not to be watching. A rep with a shaved head, a tattoo, and a bleeding arm; a girl who had wet herself. What a magnificent show they’d put on.